CHAPTER XVIII
Their running and stumbling figures were antlike as they scattered down the swaying red-rock slope, instinctively seeking the imagined haven of the forest. The earth thundered beneath their feet while the sky darkened with spreading smoke clouds, dull red in a flow of volcanic fire. As they staggered across the arena they were but vaguely aware that something was missing there.
"Stockton took off in the air car!"
This was the first insurgent report when the earthquake stopped. Billy Vinet found them trying to collect themselves – Danny, Freddie, Lyshenko and Poyntner along with Elliott who had rescued the Skipper's precious transcorder. Henshaw and Bjornson joined them in the dense fern glade where they were picking themselves up and catching their breaths.
"We shot him down," said the Axe, scratched and sweating from his exertions. In his brawny arms was one of the heavier guns from the armored rover.
The general consensus was that Cyrus Stockton might be a secessionist spy since he had departed before the earthquake and left the rest of the Council delegation stranded. The Skipper conceded that downing him was perhaps justified.
"The car can't be too far away," added Henshaw.
"Then we'd better get to it," suggested Danny. "Jules will need the med-kit."
Elliott had been hit by failing debris in the cavern. One side of his face was a mass of blood.
"Where is everybody else?" asked Lyshenko. There was a strange, quick brittleness in his voice.
Kenny Makart and Kerby Zellon had just arrived.
"Can't you hear those horns?" grunted Zellon, gaunt and pale under his battered hat. "The Tallies are tooting a rally call. I think Ravano's decided to head for the ships."
Makart said he had seen Noley and Lalille with Akala and some of the Krias. They were being escorted by a mounted lancer detail, probably going to join the king's party somewhere in the forest. He presumed that was where Sam had gone.
"The Bishop didn't go with them," snickered Zellon. "We saw him holding up those monk skirts of his and running off into the woods like the devil was on his tail!"
"The others are safe at least," commented Poyntner.
Danny thought fleetingly of Jerry Fontaine but trusted the seventh sense of his furtive nymphs and satyrs to have warned him in time to escape from the temple.
"Where are the other insurgents?" Lyshenko demanded of Bjornson. When he was informed they were combing the ridge for survivors, he insisted that Ravano had to be contacted.
"We still have to conclude this conference, now more than ever! I have a new compromise for him."
Vinet and Zellon agreed to take the message. Makart, Henshaw and Bjornson would go with Lyshenko's group in search of the air car, which might be repairable.
"You'll need some weapons," said Vinet. "We've stashed some away that we salvaged when everybody lit out from the caves."
Four of the insurgents went after the extra guns, leaving Bjornson behind. Elliott was growing weaker from dizziness and loss of blood. Danny made him lie down while Freddie produced a dainty headscarf and sought to stanch the bleeding.
It was only then that some of the reactions from the temple experience began to set in. There was no verbal mention of the Laha emergence at first, but there was a change in mannerisms and attitudes. Freddie's face was flushed with an inner intensity and her hands shook visibly, while Danny felt his eyeballs had changed, limning every detail in an incredible glow of new reality. When he recalled the shining Great Ones and saw their faces again, Boozie's cosmotape spun in his head, bringing him the far voices and music of people and worlds without end. It was a shock state of mental euphoria, too much to grasp in a lifetime.
Poyntner had demonstrated that he could not be the long-suspected mastermind behind the secessionist plot. His mouth was grimly set as his steely array eyes studied everyone present, his scientific mind apparently racing to readjust his models of life and the universe.
"What's your compromise to Ravano, Alex?" he asked suddenly. "I think I can guess."
"An interface agreement," answered Lyshenko in an oddly metallic tone. "The colony's in for the long term here. We'll have to have peace. Because the ship goes!"
Freddie paused, darting a worried, searching glance at Danny,
"You mean hiber?"
"That's right! I don't know what the hell a 'Sun Death' is, but I'm taking that warning we heard in the cave. Our time has run out!"
Poyntner played no roles, neither of skepticism nor of scientific superiority. "That earthquake was fairly normal, considering the local geology. I still tend to stick to our tectonic surveys. There shouldn't be any major seismic cataclysms." He smiled without humor and shrugged. "At least as far as we know. I'll admit a visitation like we've just witnessed can override whatever we think we're sure of. I'll say this: Earth has got to know what we've learned here. Those intelligences said we'd be gated through the Barrier when we go back. At this point I wouldn't deny any possibility."
"We're making the hiber trip," Lyshenko decided. "That means that the colony–"
"That means," interrupted Bjornson, "that you're going to have to fight the secessionists to do it."
"None are left!" retorted the Skipper. "Alonso was the madman among us but he's in custody. Stockton is either dead or at our disposal, if he was involved in the first place."
"You're forgetting Pike," persisted the Axe stubbornly.
"I am in charge!" shouted Lyshenko. An unwonted glitter of almost frantic defiance shone in his narrowed eyes. His stocky frame stiffened with urgent militancy. "We are back to Flight Command now. Forget the Project! Major Pike is still first officer. He'll do what he's told and he'll be part of the six-man crew. There'll be myself, Pike, Troy, Mabuse, Gogarty, and either Bruno or Hapgood."
Poyntner caught Frederica's sudden reaction as she gripped Danny's wrist tightly. "Alex," he said, "I want to be on board. The scientific message is too tremendous to be merely reported. I want to deliver this cosmic discovery to Earth myself. We won't forget the Project, my friend, and that's by the book!" While the Skipper stared at him he added mildly, "Which would relieve Captain Troy to represent you on the Colonial Council. I think you understand what I mean."
Freddie looked up, startled, searching their faces incredulously.
Poyntner smiled knowingly. "Danny and Freddie and Lalille should be able to give our poor Tallullah moral support, now that her marriage to the Duke has been dissolved."
The Skipper studied Danny and Freddie for a long moment. "I see you have a point," he said finally. "I can also use your corroboration of what we've been through here in the temple – although how the hell it's all going to be explained is certainly beyond me! All right then, that's decided. Dan'll stay with the colony."
When Danny looked into Freddie's widened, hopeful eyes, a bolt of realization struck him. He and this woman together, the Earth dreams transplanted to Eden, after all. He knew she saw his answer, and her lips trembled. They were interrupted by the return of the other men with the weapons.
* * * *
Their chance came later.
Vinet and Zellon had gone to find Ravano and bring him Lyshenko's message. Henshaw, Makart and Bjornson led the way toward the fallen air car. They took turns carrying Elliott on their backs.
"The north trail should take us close to it," the Swede advised. "Maybe a mile or so."
Finally, Danny and Freddie were able to drop behind the others on the winding, gently sloping trail. It was late afternoon, and the sun's slanting rays shafted through the upper terraces of the towering forest, briefly dispersing the reddish gloom of the drifting volcanic clouds. They walked in a word-searching silence, their hands clasped painfully together. It was a pain of gladness, as welcome as shining tears. The glow of wonder that touched their world with magic was due to more than love's realization. Both of them knew they'd never be the same after the temple experience. This was metamorphosis, as Holy Sam had described it. To positively know that n
o one was alone anymore, that womb-to-tomb futility was an illusion and that the cosmos was eternally and vibrantly alive with collective consciousness and purpose – this was a soaring new perspective that made each twig or leaf a priceless wonder and electrified the meaning of even a breath of air. It was too much for human instinct. They held onto each other, blinded by a vision, fearing that they would awake from a far too fragile dream.
They came to a small grassy clearing in a fern dell by a cascading stream and stopped. Above them they heard the chuckling of furry khaitabus and the rustling flutter of tropical birds. In a far place the high, echoing wail of the maita-bhava flutes was faintly audible.
She turned to him in her trim blue jumper and dainty half-boots. Her face was alight. She was suddenly small and girlish and no shield at all was between them. As he studied her wonderingly she touched her chignon and the last of its fastenings gave way. Her dark hair fell abundantly across her shoulders and she shook it loosely around her in a consciously female gesture.
He smiled faintly at her. There still were no words. Then she was in his arms. The hard years of loneliness and hopeless uncertainty, between now and that moment on the star ship when he had kissed her and known what he wanted, all that and the denial of waiting was gone, along with the package they had imported across the stars. Her crying and the trembling of her mouth against his was for the release from past uncertainty, the sudden discovery of hope and new beginning.
Somewhere in timeless ecstasy an ominous sound broke the spell. Danny looked up from her love-swollen lips, then leapt to his feet. She turned in the deep grass to stare at a nightmare. She jumped up with a scream. He snatched up his gun. "Freeze!" he told her, and she froze.
Both of them had the same thought. Was the dream to end where it started?
The fourteen-foot scarlet-faced Rak stood only ten yards away, hugely powerful, naked except for a ragged fur loincloth. The single gleaming red orb in its forehead was focused intently on Freddie. From its throat came a low, rumbling growl. The stained incisors were bared in a snarling grimace. The long troglodyte arms ended in murderously taloned hands.
Through Danny's mind raced the same tales of horror he knew Freddie must be recalling now – how these Titan beastmen went on rogue forays of their own when in the heat of must, stealing women and fatally raping them in their cavern lairs, if they didn't cannibalize their victims instead. His trigger finger tightened. Only a cutting hall of lead could stop the beast if it charged. But could it be stopped before those heavy talons reached the girl?
"Slowly," he whispered to her. "Get behind me."
As she compiled, the monster growled more menacingly and took a step forward.
"Oh God, Danny!" she whispered back. "It's going to attack!"
At that moment, however, other whisperings emerged from the forest around them, a trill of voiced nature sounds and musical twittering. The giant creature tensed but seemed to lose some of its belligerence. Then it took a step back as a strange figure appeared in front of it, accompanied by a grunting red-haired satyr.
Jerry Fontaine, deeply tanned and lithe on his hard-muscled legs, held his obsidian-tipped spear within ten feet of the cyclops beast. His blond hair was down to his powerful shoulders and his curly beard half-covered his chest.
"Jerry!" called Danny. "Watch out!" He started to move toward him to give him support with his weapon, but Jerry waved him back urgently.
"Jerry?" whispered Freddie, astounded at this living proof of Danny's incredible story.
"Stay back," Jerry warned, "and don't shoot. You'd only enrage him. This takes a palaver."
Palaver? Danny exchanged glances with Freddie. Was it possible to communicate with these things?
What followed, especially for Freddie, was a fantasy beyond the veils of dreaming, here on the anywhere world in some mythical eon lost to racial memory. In an Elysian forest glade, a cyclops giant surrounded by enchanted pygmy creatures – the blond hermit figure with his satyrs and nymphs. To the sound of a mixed language of chirruping fairy woodnotes and latrant gnomish chatter, the Moals and dakshas slowly emerged into the twilight clearing to cast their forgotten spell.
A red haze of twilight had touched the glade with a mystique of hushed remoteness like a veil that secluded them from all other worlds. The giant had gone, impelled by what Jerry could only partly explain. She had never seen the Moals before, having only heard incredible descriptions of them. Relieved of the threat of the Rak and overjoyed by Jerry's unexpected resurrection, she had gathered up her new dream with renewed fervor and gone into ecstasies over his little people, as she called his mysterious retinue.
Jerry had been trying to lure the Moals back to human haunts, knowing that they would have to mingle closely at least with the Tallies to make the crossing in Ravano's ships. Those who had recently opened their eyes, though more helpless and lost than their inwardly sighted companions, were the most receptive to humans because they could see them physically. One young Moal girl had taken to Freddie like a child to an adopted mother. In a strange transport of sympathy and compassion, Freddie had cried for the innocent helplessness of the between children of nature. She had held the fay, delicate creature and petted her, kissing her exotic dryad face and stroking her gossamer hair. Other Moals sat around them in the flowered meadow among happily gibbering dakshas. Some of them were outwardly blind yet linked en rapport with their changeling companions.
Danny had gotten to scratch Red's satyr-like ears in the meantime. This was the same dog-faced creature who had ridden the chaitla and rescued Jerry from his cage. Since then he had been a constant Man Friday in Jerry's wilderness seclusion. As to immediate plans, Jerry expressed a mood of secret urgency, impelled by a presentiment of cataclysm. The temple experience had crystallized his isolationism, at least where the colony was concerned.
"Others will remain as Servers," he quoted the Lahas. "That's my only route now. The Sirius III will go someday. You'll all be going back. The Moals and the dakshas are like an adopted family. I'll get them across to the mainland with the Tallies and take it from there. That will be my bag, I guess, like another incarnation."
Before Danny could interrupt, he went into the Rak situation. "Something's stirring with them, too," he explained. "They have a kind of extra sense, although they've always picked up their main signals from the Moals, until we arrived and broke up the collective network. It was a two-way symbiosis in the old days. The Moals were their instinctive eye and they were the outer eye, and also their protectors. In fact the Raks were at one time the guardians of the temple at Terra Nova in the days of the Lahas. Recently they've been at nervous loose ends, tending to go on solo forays unguided by anything but the basic urges of hunger and lust. That's why they're becoming so dangerous and hard to control."
He revealed that he was the one who had kept the Raks from making more frequent attacks on the base camp. The scarlet-faced giant was known to Jerry as Ughur, the chief of the dwindling cyclops pack. Through the Moals and dakshas, a bridge of communication had been maintained, chiefly because the Raks themselves were instinctively confused and had a need to satisfy their curiosity. They saw the Dragon Sons of Maitluccan as defilers of the god place they had always guarded. They sensed that their strange loss of orientation and their restless wanderings and awareness of disaster were all the result of this devil spell that had fallen upon the great temple. The rising fires from the volcanoes were a constant warning to them. The angry rumblings of the earth were the voices of the mountain gods, urging them to drive the Dragon Sons from the medicine house of the Great Ones. Jerry had been able to convey to Ughur that the presence of Maitluccan was a part of the Great Ones' plan, and that soon the Dragon Sons would be gone.
"They're dimly aware of something heavy hanging over their heads. It's almost as if they were waiting for their own oracular sign. They're restless as hell and I don't blame them. The Raks don't know it but this is the end of the line for them. It's like the doom of the dinosaurs
. The ship and the colony will go. The Tallies will emigrate, and I'm taking the Moals and the daks along with me. When this big island goes down in flames in a flood of lava, they'll go with it. They may not have the whole picture, but I know they keep looking at Terra Nova as the source of their trouble."
Danny cut him off. "Jerry, there's something you should know."
He and Freddie both explained Lyshenko's latest policy and decision. That the colony was going to interface with Ravano's people was a new concept for him, but he disagreed that war might be averted. He insisted he had this warning from the Moals themselves.
"Maybe you over-imagine the crystal-balling your nymphies do," countered Danny.
"You heard the Oracle!" Jerry countered almost heatedly. "War walks the land. No. I've got to get to Ravano myself. It's getting late. You'd better join the others."
"Speaking of that Oracle," said Freddie, "haven't you forgotten something, Jerry?" She had been poignantly aware of the exquisite innocence and beauty of the Moal girl she'd been petting. Mindful of what Danny had told her, the tragic fate of Buli had moved her visibly, but her concern was chiefly for Jerry, She had been studying him with an increasing pensiveness as they talked. Finally, she brought up the subject that was foremost in her thoughts. "Lalille would be happy to know you're alive, Jerry." She soberly watched his reaction, the while she was aware of Danny's knowing glance. He had evidently been working up to the same idea.
The fawnlike expression in Jerry's soft-brown eyes changed suddenly. A shadow crossed the elfin hermit's mask. For a brief moment, a flash of painful reality stabbed through to the outer world. Then it was gone, forced away into a secret crypt of sorrowful memory.
Star Quest Page 23